Disclaimer – this is a fiction inspired by a photograph of Arsene Wenger; Wenger was 28 at the time the picture was taken, and his career was moving rapidly towards management. There is a certain beauty to it that I couldn’t resist setting differently

There is an Arsene Wenger that used to exist, and there is an Arsene Wenger exists today. The two are different, almost entirely, though they take a similar shape and possess similar dreams and ideas.

The Wenger of the past existed only up to a certain moment, a moment that he had been building up to for his entire life. When it came to him, that moment, he was ready. His preparation was complete, and he could not fail to achieve his destiny.

The ball came to his feet while he was playing for his hometown club Strasbourg against Monaco, and the gangly Wenger took it under his spell the way only he knew how. He kept it at his feet, as though it was a small dog and he was walking to the shops with it, as he approached a Monaco defender. This was where the moment came into being.

The same moment occurred for another footballer some years later. In the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, Diego Maradona had cast a spell over a football, and approached the Belgium defence, pausing for a split second in one of the most famous images of his, or any, career.

Wenger’s image is perhaps less celebrated, but no less pivotal. In that moment, with the ball at his feet and his eyes beyond the defender, all things were possible. In that moment, Wenger existed in a state of maximum potential. He could do anything. He could pass, he could dribble, he could shoot. He had everything ahead of him, and it was within his power to achieve it.

From the pitch of the Stade de la Meinau, his legend could spread. It could take him beyond Strasbourg, beyond France and beyond Europe. That potential to achieve, and the things he could do when he fulfilled it, promised everything.

The decision he took in that split-second was pivotal to Wenger, the action he took after it crucial, and the combination of the two had the power to shape both the rest of his life, and football as a whole.

He paused. He paused to think, and he paused to appreciate, reassured by the knowledge that everything he had done had been in readiness for this. He paused.

And then the ball bobbled in front of him as he tried to keep in under control, and in an instant the defender was upon him and the moment was gone. His chance for everything has slipped through his fingers in the blink of an eye, the possibility he might attain football perfection had eluded him, and would never again cast its potential over his game.

Broken, Wenger never again reaches the heights of that moment, the Wenger captured in that photograph is the very height of the footballing Wenger, his flame never burning as brightly as it did in that moment.

That moment is the exact moment that the Wenger of today was born. The Wenger of today is aware of that moment, and is aware that opportunity should be grasped by both hands the second it presents itself because to let it pass by, even for the blinking of an eye, is to allow the potential that it could be gone forever.

His Arsenal teams are formed with that in mind. His constant promotion of youth is to ensure that his team is filled with players who might yet have their moment of maximum potential ahead of them.

He is haunted by the idea that not only will it have passed him by, but that he will oversee other players experiencing a similar thing, and watch boys he has nurtured from a young age, blooding them through League Cup games and in late season victories over relegation candidates, become a shell of the player they might have been, an empty husk of their potential, forever remembered for what they might have become rather than what they did – 60,000 people suspending them in time a moment before they even really existed.

He cannot let go of the idea that somebody else will oversee Arsenal and see Arsenal’s players come to that point, and cannot comprehend that his anxiety over what happened to him can affect some of the players in his charge as well.

Wenger could have been everything, but now he can only be Wenger. And while that may eventually prove to have been enough, in the moment, in the present, it can never be.

You never forget your first, they say,
You never forget your first.
Mine featured Stoke on a November day,
A tempestuous, harrowing joyburst.

The flatness, the ennui, familiar then,
To be lit into action but when?
Lee Richardson struck from the edge of the box,
All poise and composure and zen.

Stoke came back with a bullet just kissing,
The base of the crossbar from young Andy Griffin,
At one one our dreams came to hang by a thread,
And the minutes ticked by, bringing nothing but dread.

Enter Marcus Stewart and his visceral roar,
The passion we’d felt but had not seen before,
It wasn’t a beauty, but damn it he’d scored,
What else could we ask for, back then, and what more?

The last ten minutes then passed by in a haze,
The longest denouement, each second took days,
Stoke pressed, and Stoke pressed, Town grimly repelled,
The black shadow lifting – the demon was felled?

Then Stoke won a corner. The keeper went up,
It was only a league game, but it felt like a cup,
A miskick! A clearance! The victory was won!
It was only the first (but at least we had one).

Dalton went clear, with the ball at his feet,
Put his head down and ran, even though Stoke were beat,
He looked up, and stumbled, and he shot and it rolled,
Ever slower and slower, but still towards goal.

It made it, and nestled down low in the net,
Those Terriers, our Terriers, were not buried yet,
That story’s recounted, again and again,
But that day, all that mattered was what happened then.

You never forget your first, they say,
You never forget your first,
And mine was that moment that Huddersfield beat Stoke,
And all of that pressure dispersed.

This is perhaps the longest tribute to a piece of furniture that I have ever written. I miss it, and I don’t, but I always carry it with me (not like that, I’m not a Leeds fan).

The year is 1996, and the place is a seat near the front of the Kilner Bank Stand of Huddersfield’s Alfred McAlpine Stadium.

There are a couple of teenage boys next to one another there; there is nothing unusual about them to look at, though they are beginning to become a couple of teenage boys, rather than a couple of boys with a parent or guardian nearby.

Huddersfield Town are playing a League Cup tie against Colchester United, an uninspiring affair that only around 5,000 fans have roused themselves to attend.

Those seats you saw, and those teenage boys you saw, were as one for a number of years. Come rain, come shine, come snow and come hail, they sat in those seats, just close enough to the front feel the effect of whichever of those weather conditions was going on.

They see victories and defeats, great goals, horrendous misses, players on their way to greatness and, sadly, some horrific injuries.

They travel to away games together, seeing the same lists of things but in different stadia as well, but always interjected by their return to their home seat.

They know the people around them, the family that grows happily in the row behind, the father and son, himself a teenager at first, who arrive just before kickoff and everyone stands up to let them past, greeting them happily.

Saturdays and Tuesdays become part of this community. The two are asked about away games if those near them didn’t attend, sometimes even about reserve games, because they go to those, too.

It will go on forever, this pair of supporters; eventually theirs will be the swelling families in these seats, theirs the teenage sons who arrive just about in time. This is the nature of football, you own just a small part of it, and you pass it on to the next generation.

The year is 2017, the John Smith’s Stadium is packed to the rafters, every seat cherished and wanted, every supporter full of the hope and expectation that only a new season can bring, the gnarled memories of disappointments of the past filed away as unnecessary.

A tall man walks down the front of the Britannia Rescue Stand, for all things in modern football that can have a company name attached will do. He has finished a conversation with an old friend, someone he knew as a teenager, but has left behind.

They reminisced happily, about all they wanted to be and all they are, about close friends they still see; two lives separated by much but held together by much, too. Friendships like that are rare, and he thinks that, this tall man, as he walks along the front of the stand to his seat.
He stops at the bottom of stairway leading up to it. There is a young family there; a dad, a mum and a girl of about four is in his seat.

She is wearing the blue and white striped home shirt, her face is painted and she looks utterly joyous to be there.

It is a far cry from how I used to be in that seat, he thinks, but she has not – can not – have enjoyed the same experiences I had there, the ups and the downs, the happiness and the sadness, not yet, not all of it. He hopes she does.

He looks behind the girl; the family that was always swelling is still there. He waves to them, and they wave back, but he is a memory now. They used to see him every week, but it is now barely once every two or three years. The seat that was once his is now someone else’s, and their community is with them.

He walks on, to an unfamiliar seat in the corner of the stand. He is happy to be there, but sad, too. So much has changed, so much that once was there is missing, so much happiness that he found there is now elsewhere. He does not return often, and he will not return often.

The year is 2035, and the HDOne Kilner Bank Stand opens its gates early to allow in the crowd to enjoy the summer festival that is being held before the game.

A young mother enters with a pram, chatting on a mobile phone to a man. She tells him they are just in, and he can meet them whenever.

When she gets to the seat, her seat, the man is already there. He is with an older man, familiar looking, and happy. This older man peers into the pram to his granddaughter, and the group stand together in this spot talking about life, about their friends, about people they all know.

Sometimes they point around the stadium to illustrate their point, because people are known, and their seats are known; part of their identity, part of who they are.

They sit together for the game, each of the adults taking a turn with the child when it is upset, or hungry, and each reporting what was missed when they return.

“We had a corner, but they headed it over”

“I thought he might get booked for that”

The game ends, and they go back to their homes; they will return, to this ground, to this seat, forever. Eventually, the baby will come on her own, football having been passed down to her as a gift from her parents.

She will see the highs, the lows, the beauty and the brutal, and she will pass that on to her children, and they will come, in some twenty, thirty, forty years time, they will come, and they will do the same.

To the same seat, to the same spot, to the spot that used to belong to two teenage boys, that I was one of. It was a long time ago, and a long way away, and I am no longer that boy and that seat, E68, is no longer my seat.